LOUISVILLE, ky. — At 21c, the sleek museum and hotel in Kentucky’s largest city, art turns into water and invites you to bathe in it. It’s the most immersive cultural experience one can imagine in the roped-off world of high-end painting and sculpture.

And also: art made from video, sound, light, text, digital imagery and motion-activated sensors. This is 21c, after all, and the objects are all culled from the boundary-free 21st century.

Checking in at the lobby, taking an elevator to one of the 90 rooms, dining in the restaurant — all exhibition spaces here — a guest gets the distinct feeling of living in the present, despite the building’s historic outer shell.

The hotel is fully modern, from the furniture to the coffee makers. The architecture is green and contemporary; four, adjacent 19th-century tobacco and bourbon warehouses connect on the inside into one entity.

The art, too, captures this very moment, not just in the myriad forms represented, but in its subject matter and geography. Today’s emerging artists come from the U.S., but also China and Burundi, Morocco, South Africa, Iceland, Brazil and Chile.

The work is owned by philanthropists and hoteliers Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, who opened 21c in 2006 as a way to stimulate economic development in their city and share their vast, and growing, holdings with the public. Unlike most museums, it is a for-profit venture, with the proceeds helping to build a collection that now has about 2,000 pieces in it.

And unlike most inns, customers can avail themselves of the art, headquartered in 9,000 square feet of exhibition space on the first floor and in the basement.

Of course, they could ignore it, and some do. The hotel has a convenient location for travelers with business downtown.

Or they can have coffee with it in the morning. Walk around it at 4 a.m. on a sleepless night. The galleries are open 24 hours.

Stites directs all of the art programming at 21c, most often organized into themed shows that change twice a year. The current exhibit, “Blue: Matter, Mood and Melancholy,” explores the color’s impact on the way we see, and it features an international roster. Some are leading names, like Korean-born Do Ho Suh, the Danish and Norwegian duo Elmgreen and Dragset and Iceland’s Ragnar Kjartansson, whose six-hour video of three young women repeating the phrase “The Weight of the World Is Love,” is a star attraction.

The other major exhibit, “Convergence” has highlights from the collection with buzz-worthy artists like the Gao Brothers from China and Hungarian Levente Herman, America’s Wilmer Wilson. No other museum has such a sharp focus on art from the last dozen years.

21c appears to be a commercial success as well. A second hotel opened last month in Cincinnati, another debuts next month in Bentonville, Ark., (the suddenly famous home to the massive, Walmart-funded Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art) and rumor has it a fourth will come to Lexington, Ky., in 2014.

The operators are optimistic the new hotels will have the same sort of civic success 21c has enjoyed in Louisville, where it’s become a symbol of the city’s growing art scene

“21c has been playing dual roles: one as a museum where you can also sleep, and two, as an unofficial docent to out-of-towners who don’t realize there’s more to Louisville — and Kentucky as a whole — than fast horses and smooth bourbon,” according to Julia L. Wilson, who publishes the sophisticated magazine called Story, covering the state’s burgeoning culture, food and retail scene.

The museum hotel concept works because it understands that art needs to be seen to matter. Without human eyes on it, it’s just paint and canvas (or, more and more, ones and zeroes).

21c makes new work visible, respectable, approachable. And it has free WiFi.

“Judas,” a new novel by Amos Oz, is a paradox of stillness and provocation. The Israeli author, a long-rumored contender for the Nobel Prize, has reduced the physical action of this story to a tableau of domestic grief.